The present invention relates to a method of and apparatus for making tampons. More particularly this invention concerns a fully automatic arrangement which produces feminine-hygiene tampons from a strip of pressable cotton-type material.
It is known to produce a feminine-hygiene tampon from a strip of cotton-like material by severing a portion from this strip, winding it up into a so-called tampon blank, pressing the blank to reduce its size and form it into a relatively unitary cylindrical body, and thereafter often heating the thus-pressed body to fix its shape and form a finished tampon which is then inserted into an applicator tube or the like. These four steps--severing, winding, pressing and heating--must be carried out often at separate locations. For this reason automatic mass production of such a product often is relatively complex and requires considerable machinery.
It has been suggested to combine the severing and winding operations in a single machine so as to produce the above-mentioned tampon blank. Such machinery is frequently very hard to control and operate, so that if anything goes wrong the entire machine and, therefore, the entire production operation must temporarily be shut down. In addition the transporting of the relatively fragile tampon blanks from this machine to the necessary pressing machine is problematic in that the blank frequently unwinds en route and therefore becomes unpressable.
Such a machine is frequently formed as a so-called carousel having a plurality of treatment units or stations which orbit past the supply of the strip material and carry out the necessary pressing operations. Although such a construction does aid in the automatic manufacture of small items such as tampons, it has the enormous disadvantage that whenever any one of the treatment units breaks down the entire carousel must be stopped. The same construction has been used also for the tampon press. Invariably the tampon press and the severing and winding units are separate, in order that they can be serviced separately and that disturbances to the one will not too greatly affect the other.
Various such machines can be seen in Swiss Pat. Nos. 334,460 and 393,631 as well as in U.S. Pat. No. 2,798,260 and British Pat. No. 630,104.